


he hasn't earned it

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Ronan Taking Things Very Badly, Suicide, The Dream Thieves Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 19:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He did too good a job of getting under your skin and now he has to live there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	he hasn't earned it

**Author's Note:**

> This has been kicking around in my WIPs for a while now, so I'm glad I finally got it somewhere I'm happy with. Huge thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for all her insightful input.

Kavinsky’s waiting for you in Cabeswater.

You knew he would be, and you stayed up guzzling coffee to stave sleep off because you didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to have to look at his sunglasses and his singlet and all his hideous burns. If you look at him head-on, you don’t see them, but from the corner of your eye, he’s still on fire.

Fucking ‘easy way out’ piece of shit.

He’s trampling vines, the same ones that had bit at him less than a day ago – and it doesn’t feel like less than a day, it feels like Kavinsky’s been dead for years – but he’s not kicking hard enough to destroy them and the vines aren’t fighting back. It’s a worthless, violent motion, an attempt to find an outlet, something accountable, something solid to take the place of everything intangible that can’t fall beneath his fists.

When he looks to you, his sunglasses disappear, and you’re forced to face what’s underneath. Unshielded his eyes are hollow, bitter, a well of resentment deep enough to drown in. You turn your head. Flicker, burn. You shouldn’t have looked at his corpse, but you did. You wanted to see what he’d done to himself. 

“Lynch,” he says, too haunted to sound casual, and he’s got an awareness that dream-creatures shouldn’t. He’s the realest thing that’s ever been in this impossible place and he wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t brought him. You want to stop, remove him from your dream but you can’t help _thinking_ about him, about the dragon, about the entire night and all his relentless messages leading up to it. Was it your last chance to come around, or he had invited you to be a witness?

Your fingers curl into fists, skin over your knuckles taut and scabbed. He breaks some thorns from the vine under his feet, grinds them down into the dirt, and Cabeswater doesn’t retaliate because he’s as much a part of it as the night horrors now. You try to decide if he’s better or worse for having been real in the first place, and you tell him, “This isn’t yours anymore.”

He laughs, a choked sound of disbelief, spits out, “No shit?” and you wonder how much it’s hurting him to be here, to have to continue. Real Kavinsky’s getting his rest. “Are you going to bring me back?”

He deserves it. Deserves worse. You don’t know if it’s even _your_ choice whether or not he comes out, all the other crap you don’t want seems to make it into the waking world past you. Maybe it’s his choice, if he wants to give himself a second chance, if he wants to go out in a bigger fireball next time.

If he did, you’d probably just dream up another copy of the fucker. He did too good a job of getting under your skin and now he has to live there.

All you say is, “Maybe,” and think that there would be nothing in the entire world worse than Joseph Kavinsky coming back to life.

“I thought you wanted to get rid of me, Lynch,” he says, and he has no shades to hide the betrayal in the vicious look he gives you. “You missed me enough to bring me back _here_ , but I don’t want to fuck around in these woods forever.”

You don’t like the idea of him alone in Cabeswater either, trampling over all Gansey’s wonder, Adam’s heart, Noah’s grave. Things that matter more than he does. “I wonder if you’re stuck here without me?” you wonder aloud, just to put the fear of it in him. He snarls.

You feel consciousness pulling at you, dream starting to fade around the edges, and you turn away from Kavinsky, crackling flames consuming him as you avert your gaze. You really don’t want to see whatever fucking sneer is spoiling his lips right now. He’s not like a night horror, somehow both more and less real than they ever were, and his exclusion starts to feel like a choice that you get to make.

You leave him behind.

 

You wake, bleary and angry, but alone. A bad night’s sleep is nothing compared to the relief of finding no body in bed beside you, and you throw yourself back onto the sheets, rubbing a hand over your face and telling yourself that you’re not going to see him again.

Noah doesn’t make a sound when he arrives, but you’re used to the shroud of chill that he huddles in. He’s quiet and flickering, but you are not in the mood to play ‘guess what’s wrong with the ghost’, so you just growl, “ _What_ , Noah?”

“You should let him go,” Noah tells you, voice mournful and reproachful and requesting patience that you absolutely do not have to spare.

You push yourself up on your elbows to glare at him. He’s in sharp contrast today, the black smudge on his cheek consumingly dark against his bloodless skin, as he stares at you plaintively. “I _have_ let him go,” you snap. “Do you see him here? No? Then that means I woke up and he’s dead like he’s meant to be.”

Noah gives you a look that he probably means to be significant. It is remarkably easy not to care. “I’m just saying,” he murmurs, and he doesn’t look quite solid anymore. You press the heels of your palms hard into your eyes to force the sleep from them, and then he’s gone. You don’t want to acknowledge how much he seems to know about the inside of your head, so you decide not to acknowledge him at all. 

 

It’s not that you put off going to sleep that night. It’s that you’re an insomniac anyway, and Gansey’s up too, practicing his Welsh pronunciation. And after Gansey’s gone to bed, it’s that Noah wants to sit up in your room and hear all your music. And after Noah has filtered away to nothing, it just so happens that you want to press your forehead against the window and ignore the bed waiting behind you, even as exhaustion settles deep behind your eyes. It’s not something you can avoid forever, but it’s something you can avoid until the choice is taken from you and your weary body lays itself down. When sleep comes uninvited, what you find feels less like your fault.

He’s there because you don’t want him to be. He’s crouched at the base of an oak, glowering like a grated fire, but he’s on his feet as soon as you appear, fisting his hands in your shirt and yanking you back. “ _Lynch_ ,” he snarls, and you don’t think you ever saw him like this when he was alive. Other people must have. But you always got a good-humoured edge that has long since left him. “You cannot _fucking_ do this to me.”

“I don’t want you here either,” you tell him, wrenching his hands off your shirt. It tears, and either it’s a dream shirt and it doesn’t matter or it’s real and it still doesn’t matter beyond being the last petty damage he can ever inflict. “Why can’t you just fuck off on your own?”

“You _put me here_ ,” he cries, and you realise he’s sober, that he’s been ruining his hair by raking his hands through it, that the awful twist of his lips is Kavinsky forced to be Kavinsky when he shouldn’t have to anymore. Something in you churns, low and sick, and worse is the thought that this is _the same one_ from last night. He’s continuing, persisting. You are dreaming up an entire second life for him.

A bitter little whisper from the back of your skull says that it’s what he has coming. You didn’t just opt out. Neither can he.

But you tell him, “I didn’t put you here,” even as you wonder how close to a lie that might be.

He hisses out through his teeth, and whatever patience he used to have for you burned up with the rest of him. “Get me the fuck out, Lynch. Or at the _very least_ dream me up a distraction.”

“Get one yourself.”

His eyes are coal black, and you don’t think they were ever so dark when he was alive. “I can’t. I can’t _sleep_.”

 

Again when you wake, you make sure he’s not there, that his hand didn’t snag your singlet on the border of reality and pull the rest of himself through. You’re not alone, though; Noah’s there, watching, a shimmer of Kavinsky’s fire reflected in his black ghost eyes. You throw a bottle at the wall behind him to get him to leave, and then you heave a tight, ragged breath into your sheets because _fuck_. Fuck.

 

Kavinsky is a machine that only exists to turn itself off. You’ve stolen his only function.

He was an expert at dodging both consciousness and lucidity, a perpetual sleeper, chemical induced haze sweetening his every second. But he can’t conjure pills himself anymore, all he gets is what you give him and what you give him is fuck-all. Every night you sleep and hope that it will be the night he’s not there, and every night he’s waiting, angular and gaunt and dead. Withdrawal eats into him, makes him a shaky, sweaty mess of bloodshot eyes and twitching fingers and worthless, empty retching. If he had been alive, it might have been enough to kill him.

He seems to feel the passage of time the same as you, and he seems to know you’ve made him his own personal limbo. His anger burns out faster than you expected, and what you find beneath is worse; the deep, desperate tide of everything he was trying to get away from.

“Please man,” he begs you, and he’s so raw unfiltered, so bare without his shades, “I am dying out here in your goddamned woods. _Anything_.”

For half a second, you consider making a new Prokopenko to keep him company, but that joke’s sour before it even reaches your tongue.

He asks after his pack, and you tell him they’re dead because it’s easier than telling him that every single one of them fell asleep and won’t be getting up again. You can’t believe he replaced them all. They were _real_ , he’d taken such care in remaking them. His only reaction is a hoarse half-laugh, pressing both hands against his face and muttering, “Fucking hell,” with a tone that you don’t understand.

Whatever he feels for you now is tempered by the wretched, drawn-out existence he blames you for inflicting on him. He doesn’t joke anymore. He doesn’t grin. He doesn’t mention Gansey. You think that if he had managed not to mention Gansey before, you and he could be in a very different place right now.

You hate that he’s in your head. You hate that you have to see him every night, that he can scream and swear and you’re the only one who has to get up in the morning and carry the lost sleep and acid words around all day. You’re good at not letting shit get under your skin but he started there, his voice coiling through your blocked ears, his hollow gaze printed on the backs of your eyelids. You don’t know how to get away. You’re haunted by two ghosts, and only one has the manners to let you rest.

Noah’s around more than usual, and you think it’s the Cabeswater equivalent of second-hand smoke sticking to your singlet; he can smell it on you, all the time you’re wasting with Kavinsky’s terrible energy in the woods. He and Noah are parasites to the same host now, and you think that’s why Noah always looks a little lesser, blurred around the edges, more an impression of the person he’s meant to be. You’re not going to apologise for something that isn’t your fault.

But it’s Noah that watches you, night after night, that circles your room like he’s looking for a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses sitting vigil on your nightshade. Gansey’s written off whatever you’re doing as grief, but Noah stares at you, arcane and unblinking, and knows too many things he shouldn’t.

To escape Noah, you can sleep. To escape Kavinsky, you can’t think of anything other than ramming a railroad spike through your skull.

 

A month passes. Inside Cabeswater, Kavinsky gets quiet, out of words, out of curses. He stares when you approach, but his thin arms hang still by his side, skin tattered cinders from the corner of your eye. More than anything, he looks tired.

You know he should be dead. He’s told you too many times now, it’s what he wants.

You don’t think about it directly, but you know that inside you, a knot of very complicated feelings is slowly pulling apart. Kavinsky, sober and miserable, is wrong in a way you don’t have words for, and you’re getting sick of seeing it.

He says, “This isn’t fair,” and the aching rasp of his voice grates hard against your ears long after you’ve woken up.

 

 “You should let him go,” Noah murmurs.

It’s the first time in a long time that Noah’s come to you before you sleep instead of after, and you peel yourself away from the window to look at him. He’s just another shadow in the darkness of your room, a suggestion of a person, the illusion of a friend. “You keep saying that,” you accuse. “What exactly am I meant to be letting go of?”

“Him,” Noah says redundantly. “He left on his terms, and now you’re trying to hold him here on yours. But you can’t.”

“I’m _not holding him_ ,” you tell Noah, not for the first time. “I want him gone! He blew himself up and he _still_ won’t fuck off.”

Noah looks at you for too long, and for a second you don’t see him, you see everything that’s propping him up, the immense, unknowable power of Cabeswater. He asks, “Why are you still so angry?”

“I’m not angry,” you answer, and regret it. You hate to lie, but it took getting the words on your tongue for you to be able to taste how untruthful they are. You’re enraged, incensed, you hate Kavinsky with every single piece of you that has the energy to hate. Even though it’s been dimming for the past, miserable month you’ve spent dreaming, it’s still there, black fumes pumping through your lungs. There is an entire inferno in your heart bellowing smoke for Joseph Kavinsky.

Something bitter crawls up your throat, a foul tang of bile that you’ve been trying to ignore. When you finally lie down, your brain shutters closed in a second, and you go to see Kavinsky.

He’s where he always is, hunched up by the trees, a wreck of himself. He’s as thin and strung out as withdrawal left him, and he looks at you with dull, passionless hate. You used to come alive when you heard the rumble of his Mitsubishi, pulse quickening, muscles carefully tightening to get ready to handle him. Looking at him now is a painful, draining effort. Cabeswater gave you what you wanted, as much as it possibly could, and now you’re realising you wanted the wrong thing. It would be like dreaming your father back; it’s not real a second chance if it can’t undo the first.

Your fingers curl up into fists like you’re going to hit him, though you haven’t finished deciding what you want to do with your anger. Kavinsky notices; Kavinsky spreads his arms out wide and says, “Fucking do it.”

A solid punch from you right now would knock his head off, and the only consequence from that would be you forever knowing the feel of a body falling apart beneath your knuckles. Your fist eases open, and Kavinsky sighs. You tell him, “You’re a goddamned coward.”

“So sorry I couldn’t stick it out like _you_ ,” he says, and in the past it would have been a sneer but now the words drag, dampened, hideously unpleasant to hear.

You punch him in the gut, pulling up just short enough that he doesn’t fall back. He curls in on himself again, spitting out a shocked breath and something that might be a strain of strangled laughter. Even revived in your head, he’s still half-dead. “You were never going to go any other way, were you?”

He just grins, blood between his teeth that you didn’t put there. “You didn’t think you were going to miss me this much, huh?”

You hit him again, but it’s not satisfying. He falls too easily, all his fight incinerated with the rest of him in his dragon’s mouth. He’s decaying. This isn’t worth it. You won’t forgive him for leaving and you can’t forgive him for making the shitty fucking decision to kill himself in front of you, but for now you know you don’t need this.

You tell him, “I don’t miss you at all.”

There’s hurt and a creeping kind of satisfaction on his face when you turn away from his charred husk, but you’re too sick of this to keep score. It’s not like either of you could have ever won.

 

The next night, you lie awake and impatient for hours before Cabeswater finally reaches out to take you.

He’s not there.

Cabeswater is quiet without him. No horrors come because it isn’t a nightmare. Just a dream with a hole in it, an empty space that you look at for too long, and your heart starts to stutter. You think this is probably how you’re supposed to feel. Part of you thinks it seems sudden, but then, the last time you saw him should have been a month ago like it was for everyone else. It’s not like you want him back at all.

There’s a trampled patch of weeds and vines and nothing else because Kavinsky’s last real impact was a scorch mark and this is just for you. You sit down on the grass and rest your face in your hands, and wait for it to grow over.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I'd love to know what you thought! I also [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/).


End file.
